Apple Store Passes Two Billion Downloads Mark

When you talk about the magnitude of a business, there’s scale and then there’s scale. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) unequivocally reached the second plateau with its App Store Monday.

In a short press release, the company announced customers have downloaded more than 2 billion applications since the store’s debut. That’s a jump of 500 million downloads since July, or an even billion since April.

Steve Jobs has to be happy in Cupertino.

To add some color and put 2 billion downloads in context, we’ve hit the spreadsheets. Crunching the numbers: [click images to enlarge]

• Average Downloads Per Day - The App Store has delivered approximately 4.5m downloads per day since its debut in July 2008. Since mid July of this year, when Apple triumphantly announced it had delivered 1.5 billion downloads, the rate’s jumped to somewhere near 6.5m per day. (Ed. Note: averages are approximate due to inexact information about the days on which Apple crossed each download milestone. See table).

• Available Titles - Back in March, the App store had about 30k applications to offer. Since July, the number of available titles has jumped from 65,000 to 85,000 and the number of developers has advanced from 100,000 to 125,000.

• Free or Paid - According to an App Store product survey maintained by 148Apps, the App Store had 83,618 titles available for download in the U.S. on September 28th (just under Apple’s report of 85k titles). Of these 83.6k downloads, approximately 23%, or 19,514 titles were free.

• Categorically - By category, games are the most popular genre of download, accounting for around 17% (148Apps survey data) of currently available titles. Books and Entertainment represent the next two largest categories. Combined, the three entertainment-centric genres (books, entertainment and games) account for 37,771, or 45%, of the App Store’s offerings.

• Revenue for Apple – If only 20% of titles are purchased (at an average price of $2.51 per download) the App Store would generate about $3.3 million per day. Carving 30% of that off for Apple’s share of the sale, then annualizing it, would give the company about $362m per year. If 35% of downloads are purchased, Apple would pull in upwards of $632m per year. (Impressive as these numbers are, they’re small when compared to the $8.34b in revenue Apple returned for the most recent 3rd quarter).

• iTunes Comparables - It’s an apples to orange comparison given iTunes doesn’t really offer free products but for perspective: it took iTunes about three times as long to reach the same downloads level, and iTunes is the dominant digital music retailer.

15 years ago, Tchao was reportedly one of the developers who worked on the company’s high concept, but failed, Newton PDA tablet. From 1990 to 1994, he served as the Group Manager, Product Planning & Strategy for Personal Interactive Electronics.

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